Page 181 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

leaflets, which were distributed throughout the Volhynian countryside, spread messages of hatred

against Polish “oppressors” and promised to chase out not only Poles, but also “Muscovites and

Jews.” Only then, these activists argued, could the Ukrainians “become landlords in [their] own

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land.”
Józewski and his allies argued that there was no room for politics in the village. As a way of

making sense of what was going on, they returned to the basic ideas that underlay the state police and

KOP reports that we encountered in Chapter 3—peasants could not be imagined as rational

autonomous citizens as long as they remained easily swayed by external agitation. Instead, Sanacja

officials believed that what one internal report called “a psychological basis for the growth of Sel-

Rob Jedność influences” had resulted not from the peasantry’s understanding of the ideological

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tenets of Marxism, but rather from economic crisis and desperate food shortages. In fact,
Józewski’s supporters reckoned that peasants could not process political tracts, a factor that

explained why communists themselves refrained from spreading propaganda in Volhynia’s rural

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locales that included any theoretical engagement with Marxism.
But if the Volhynian countryside was becoming a fertile arena for anti-state agitation by the

late 1920s and early 1930s, the fault lay not only with communists and Ukrainian nationalists.

Indicating the ongoing intra-Polish battles at the level of the village, pro-Sanacja Polish elites

submitted letters to the authorities that explained how poor Polish-speaking Roman Catholic peasants

were also being subjected to right-wing Polish forces that deliberately undermined the state project.

In the early spring of 1932, Polish educational and cultural activists loyal to Józewski wrote to the

authorities in order to complain about the actions of two Roman Catholic priests, one of whom, a

62 “Wołyński Urząd Wojewódzki, Wydział Bezpieczeństwa, BBO-816/tjn/32,” DARO 143/1/73/88.
63 “Sprawozdanie z działalności partji Sel-Rob-Jedność na terenie Wołynia za czas od 1.I do 1.IX.1931 r.,” DARO
30/18/1759/ 9-9od.
64 “Protokuł obrad konferencju przedstawicieli władz administracji ogólnej wojewód poleskiego i wołyńskiego oraz
przedstawicieli władz wojskowych, odbytej w dniu 25 sierpnia 1932r. w sali konferencyjnej urzędu wojewódzkiego
poleskiego w Brześciu n/B.,” AAN UWwBnB 39/48.

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